Daygo's Fury (12 page)

With a final crescendo of drums and song and dance, with the fire roaring heat and crackling noise and assaulting the dark, the Ijo reached its zenith and, while still ferocious, almost imperceptibly began to slow. And like an after-image, with a light draping of feeling over his trance-like state, he knew that what he had felt and seen was real. Even though it had faded, felt surreal and could not be explained, he knew it was something, and he knew it was something astounding, an overarching truth of immense magnitude and importance.

As the Ijo wore to its gentle and subdued conclusion, Niisa found himself looking about in shock for some sign that the others had experienced the same as he, but they all seemed lost in the dreamy tranquillity that came with lasting effect at the Ijo’s end. He looked up at the sky, the moons and the stars, but all sat still and silent as they always did, conspirators mocking him with their denial of involvement.

He fell to the ground and sat with his palms pressed into the soil underneath him, routing into it with his fingers and thumbs, as though there he could cling to some sort of reality and truth, so that he would not be sucked away into the universe. In ignorance, afraid and wanting.

******

The fire still crackled, bright embers floated through the night air, suspended by what was invisible, yet all around him, right in front of him. Niisa raised a hand and watched as the heat or the breeze or whatever made the embers float brought one to land on his palm. There was a soft burn as it died in his hand and became just a black piece of ash. In the skies the stars were dimmed. The night seemed darker, the fire had taken his vision and died and left him without it. The sun would rise again but that fire was dust.

The tribespeople murmured and shuffled around him, hundreds of them, trying to find some space to chat or congregate or just to breathe amidst the press and the residue heat, to clear some space between themselves and the damp and sticky bodies all around. The smell of sweat and ash and heat was strong in the air. The forest was a dark mound that rose fifty feet or more all around them, closing in the open space.

In the dark, he failed to see so much that was there. In the day, the air and more could not be seen and yet he knew it was there, by some impulse, by some understanding.

Had he been blind his whole life, had he just then seen?

The air was not … empty … it was somehow full. What was available beyond their sight? What existed beyond reach? What could be found? How might he see again?

Slowly, he was hoarded towards the second fire by the press of people as an excited buzz started to fill the air. Sound. Vibrations. He allowed himself to be gently prodded towards the picking fire, and noticed absently that it had already been lit. He rubbed the fingers and thumb of his left hand together, feeling the dirt roll between them, feeling it grind and fade into his palm, from when he had clasped the earth for fear of being lost to it. Touch, he knew touch. What did he not know?

The adolescents of the nine tribes were pushed together before the second fire of the night. The slow drumbeat was started and the girls lined up to one side of the fire. They began to sing. Niisa watched them as they did. He would start the dance on the second verse, with the rest of the adolescent boys, all those with the single black stone in their right ear.

He wondered at how trapped they must be, within their own little minds, to be so caught up in fear and nerves and embarrassments over this small thing, so lacking in control or wisdom or understanding over themselves. To be so ignorant and self-consumed. How could they be so caught up in the silly repetition of their lives? He was empty of all these things that he knew existed within them.

He looked at the boys around him and saw how they fidgeted with hands and shuffled feet, glancing up repetitively at the girls in song, as though afraid they would miss their mark, as though their ears deceived them and they could not tell one verse from another.

Their mark hit and he danced with the rest of them around the fire as the greater, teeming mass watched, clapped, talked and laughed in dark clusters surrounding them. They each took part in a solo dance in front of the girls, for their judgement, while the rest continued to dance around the fire.

When the dance was over, the boys lined up before the fire. Each of the girls had three sticks, with their own coloured ribbons, made with stained strips of weedgrass tied to each one and around their left wrist. When the music ended, they ran forward in one great flurry and gave their three sticks to the boys they liked the most. In order of age, the boys chose the girl to take to a fire from the sticks they had been given, matching the colours to the wrists of the girls, and handed back the sticks they had not chosen. When all the boys handed sticks had taken their girl by the hand to find one of the many small fires set in seclusion amongst the huts throughout the Rutendon, the process was started again. Since there were two more girls than boys, the last two boys to pick would take two girls each to a fire.

As his turn came, he still had two of the three sticks he had been given to choose from. He looked at the first and knew that she was the better-looking of the two. Her nose was flatter, her hips were wider, she was a little older perhaps than the other. Her shoulders were back and proud.

He turned to look at the second girl. She had brown hair, a lighter shade, like the colour of bark. Her eyes were hidden in the dark but the fire reflected there, in the moistness of them. Her nose was more pointed, less flat than normal. Her chin protruded slightly beyond her teeth. Her hair fell over her ears and was tied in a low and loose braid from between her shoulder blades to the small of her back. Clipped underneath it and framing her neck and shoulders was the flower wreath that all girls wore at the gathering. While pretty, it was nowhere near as beautiful as the one Chiko had spent the year arranging. Her breasts were small, new and firm, her nipples dark black on her brown skin and protruded slightly. Her shoulders hunched a little. She showed a slight curve from waist to hip with small rolls of fat protruding out over each side of her walothsa. Her belly was soft, her legs were sturdy, her feet small and toes smaller.

She watched him as he watched her. She held her hands cradled in front of her belly button, and he could see the effort there not to fidget with them. He noticed her tongue pass over the teeth behind her upper lip, a giveaway of her thoughts and of her nerves. She was thinking now about how she looked, obsessing over it, Niisa guessed. She wanted to be picked, she feared being shunned. Niisa glanced to the right where more boys stood, waiting their turn, shuffling feet, twitching hands, eager and afraid their choice would be taken before them, hoping they would get a reasonable match, wanting the moment of achievement to come and be over with. He smiled. He felt none of what they felt. He lived in a different world to them.

He could feel the impatience growing all around him, but it had no impact on him. Why did he continue to play a part in their stupid games? Did he need to? He only knew that he wanted to know more, about everything other than the picking ceremony or the marriage ceremony or tribal life in general. He had heard and been told promises of connection and love all of his life but he’d never felt it, not in the sense that they told it. His love was not confined. His love was open to the entire universe, full of wonder and awe and curiosity.

He walked to the second girl in the light brown hair and took her by the hand. He handed the second stick back to the girl refused and dropped the other two beside the fire. He picked up a lighting stick from the edge of the fire and walked with it until they found a set fire that offered some small seclusion. He stuck the lighting stick into the centre of the stacked wood and sat down as it sparked to life and shared its flame.

She sat down beside him too close, so he shuffled a step away. She glanced at him and then quickly back to the fire. For a brief moment, he wondered what it would be like inside her now.

“Your name is Emeka,” he said.

She nodded.

“You’re nervous?” he asked.

“Yes.” 

“This is your first picking. What else do you feel?”

She shuffled a little. “I don’t know.”

Niisa looked at her steadily. Her eyes couldn’t stay on one thing, they flitted between him and the fire and the ground and her hands. The stupidity of her answer killed all interest he had of inner workings. She was too far beneath him and yet he knew enough to have lost interest.

“In the climax of the Ijo tonight, I … became aware of a connection between … the air … the world, almost everything, and the red moon. As though the red moon was sucking against the Earth. Did you feel anything different?”

Emeka looked a little perplexed. “No,” she said meekly, shaking her head.

Niisa looked off into the night and around the clearing, where small fires had sprung up all around. It was harder to hear the noise of the forest behind the low mumble of the tribes that seemed a constant filling through every day and night. A breeze swept his face, cooling him. He looked up at the stars.

“I always thought that I loved the forest, but I like this open space too. I like being able to see the stars and the moons. I like being able to feel the breeze. I wonder: does the forest confine us, constrict us? We can’t see the outside world, so we never venture into it.” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, Emeka was looking at him.

“What was the feeling you had at the Ijoa?”

Niisa stared straight into her eyes as he thought. She glanced down at the ground.

“It wasn’t a feeling. It was more like a sense of connection. I could sense a connection in the air, that connected it all together like it was all a part of the same. I could sense …” He paused, and slowly a feeling of elation spread over him. He smiled. “It was Daygo.” He put a hand to his mouth and looked at the ground. “I can’t believe. I hadn’t … It was Daygo. It must have been. I was sensing Daygo. Daygo in the air, tying it together.”

Emeka looked at him with wide eyes but he hardly saw her. “Just like the priests?” she asked.

“Yes. What?” he looked at her. “What do you mean? What priests?”

“The Walolang de Kgotia.”

“What do you mean, like the priests?”

“They can sense Daygo,” she said.

“They can sense it?”

“Yes. Namuso from my tribe, he was taken by the priests. Before he went—”

“They took him?”

“Yes. He told me, what you said, before he went. He said he could sense the connection. He said he could sense a change in it.”

“A change in it?”

“Yes. In the test. When they killed the squirrel. He sensed it change.”

“Change from what into what?”

“I don’t know. He said it was just, he could feel it, feel it change, when the squirrel died, he said he could feel it change. That’s all. That’s what the priests told us to look for, to see if we could sense a change, sense a moving of forms, or … or energy.”

Niisa sat back, shocked. “No one. No one ever told me. They said the priests just sat in their temple all day worshipping Daygo. They never said …” The test was about patience, she had said, to see who could stare at the one spot the longest. Never had she said that true connection was possible, that the test was to test for this. If you didn’t want to go with them, you just looked away. She had told him that years ago, when he was a small child. Had she been lying? Just teasing him as he had seen other parents do with their children, making them think something foolish for entertainment? Niisa had never understood what entertainment there was in fooling a child. He had never thought … He had thought that was how to worship Daygo, to sit in the one spot, to stay quiet and to look at the one place. He had first started doing it after that. And as time passed, the more he did it, the more peace he found, the quieter his mind became, the more connected he felt with the forest and the world, where he had never before felt connected to anything, he had always felt different, separate to the other children, the other people. But Daygo belonged to him, all things, and he belonged to Daygo. That was his comfort. That was his love. He had spent the rest of his life trying to learn more about Daygo, trying to improve his worship, increase his connection, expand his knowledge. Was it all based on a lie? A stupid, child-teasing fib?

He felt torn between the anxiety of this revelation and the excitement and endless possibility of the other.

“Explain the test to me.”

There was a pause before she continued. “He took three or four of us at a time. He had a bunch of bound squirrels that he had ordered the men to hunt that day. He told us he was going to kill the squirrel and that we were to watch very closely and tell him if any of us sensed anything, sensed a change, a … just like I said. Then he opened up its chest and guts with a knife, while it was alive. That was it. Namuso said he did sense it.”

“But I’ve killed many animals and I’ve never sensed a change.”

“In the hunt?”

“No. Not in the hunt.”

“Did you … did you eat them?”

“No.”

She quietened for a while as he continued to think.

“Why did you kill them?” she asked quietly.

“To see them die. Just like that. I wanted … I wanted to see the change. If Daygo is in everything, then how can it change from one to another, and where is the change, where is the life? Is it only in things that are alive or is it in dead things too? And what is dead and what is not? Is a dead squirrel really dead or is it just alive in other ways? Is anything really dead? Can anything really be dead? It doesn’t make sense, how can there be such a thing as dead? I wanted to see if I could see anything, if there was anything there … but I never sensed it …”